"That’s how Netflix erases Citizen Kane and Casablanca. It can’t deny the greatness of these films. But it can act as if they never happened."

"The Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now. Actual history disappears in the eternal present of the web. 

• Everything on YouTube is happening right now!
• Everything on Netflix is happening right now!
• Everything on Spotify is happening right now!

"Of course, this is an illusion. Just compare these platforms with libraries and archives and other repositories of history. The contrast is extreme.

"When you walk into a library, you understand immediately that it took centuries to create all these books. The same is true of the Louvre and other great art museums. A visit to an Ivy League campus conveys the same intense feeling, if only via the architecture.

"You feel the weight of the past. We are building on a foundation created by previous generations—and with a responsibility to future ones.

"The web has cultivated an impatience with that weight of the past. You might even say that it conveys a hatred of the past.

"And the past is hated all the more because history is outside of our control. When we scream at history, it’s not listening. We can’t get it cancelled. We can’t get it de-platformed. The best we can do is attach warning labels or (the preferred response today) pretend it doesn’t exist at all.

"That’s how Netflix erases 'Citizen Kane' and 'Casablanca.' It can’t deny the greatness of these films. It can’t remove their artistry, even by the smallest iota.

"But it can act as if they never happened."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'Is Mid-20th Century American Culture Getting Erased? (They call it the "Greatest Generation"—so why is its art disappearing?)'

Anti-slavery sculpture is being cancelled

Memorial to the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, by Vincent Gray, 2024

 

A remarkable and historically important sculpture is being denied a home.

From 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade, until 1867— two years after the US finally abolished slavery after a bloody civil war — the Royal Navy patrolled the West African coast intercepting slavers and freeing those enslaved.

For the first time in human history, a government took a stand against human slavery. Over its sixty years of operation, the Squadron is estimated to have freed 150,000 slaves!

And yet, in an era when statues themselves are being 'cancelled' — removed or destroyed because those memorialised acquired their prominence through participating or defending slavery — this monument to a remarkable act in defence of human liberty is being denied a home at its most obvious location: in Portsmouth, where the Squadron was based.

The owners of the local shopping centre, Gun Wharf Quays, located by the prominent landmark, the Spinnaker Tower, initially gave permission to site the sculpture there. But subsequently they rescinded it because the memorial ‘lacked authenticity and sensitivity’ and would remind people of ‘a dark part of the nation’s history.’
    Of course, the sculpture actually reminds us of a remarkable act of national generosity, a profound atonement for the role of some British in the slave trade of the 17th and 18th centuries. The establishment of a memorial to the West Africa Squadron does not hide the history of the slave trade nor seek to sanitise Britain’s role in first trading, and then preventing the trade of Africans. Nor would it preclude or prejudice the erection of a memorial to the slaves themselves. Slavery and freedom are part of the same historical narrative and both must be remembered. This sculpture remembers the slaves and the Royal Navy together, and will prompt thoughts and questions about both enslavement and emancipation.
    Portsmouth City Council and the Historic Naval Dockyard in Portsmouth, from where the Squadron sailed, have also declined the offer of the memorial. So has the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, the Historic Dockyard Chatham (where some of the ships were built) and Gosport City Council (where the ships were victualled). As [Colin] Kemp writes [in seeking a permanent home for the statue], ‘The current mood seems only to be interested in apologies and reparations’ and will not recognise the moral action, after abolition, ‘in sending ships to patrol the coast of West Africa for 60 years’.

It's almost like the cancellers want to cancel history.

"The 'Great Awokening' seems to be winding down." Slowly.

"After 2011, there was a rapid change in discourse and norms around social justice issues, particularly among knowledge economy professionals (i.e., people who work in fields like journalism, the arts, entertainment, law, tech, finance, consulting, education, and research).As I detail in my forthcoming book, this 'awokening' manifested in everything from poll and survey responses, to media outputs, to changes in political alignments, and beyond. Within academia, there was a sharp increase in student protest activity beginning in 2011, accompanied by growing tensions around 'cancel culture' and self-censorship. There were ballooning investments in (demonstrably ineffective) mandated diversity-related training and rapid expansions of campus 'sex bureaucracies.' Changes were also apparent in research outputs....
    "[A]fter 2011, there was a sharp increase in the use of prejudice-denoting terms. This held for virtually all forms of bias and discrimination (racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia, ableism, ageism, fatphobia, and derivatives of the same). ...
    "[B]y several measures [however], the 'Great Awokening' seems to be winding down. Starting in late 2021, and continuing throughout 2022, there appeared to be a moderation trend across many social indicators... After 2020 [especially], there were declines across the board in published research focused on identity-based bias and discrimination. Academic scholarship seems to have passed peak 'woke.' ...

"[T]he chart above does not just illustrate a significant increase in scholarly discussion of identity-based bias and discrimination after 2011. We can also see that there has been a significant decline in scholarly discussion of these issues in recent years across the board. The timelines run a bit differently for different types of prejudice or discrimination. Work on sexism and misogyny plateaued first, in 2018. Work exploring prejudice against racial and ethnic minorities, and lesbian, gay, or bisexual people, reached its zenith in 2020. Work discussing bias and discrimination against trans folks peaked a bit later, in 2021. By the end of 2022, however, all four had retreated a bit from their high-water marks. Commensurate with trends explored in my recent essay looking at other social indicators, it seems as though the 'awokening' in academic scholarship may be winding down ... "

~ Musa al-Gharbi, from his post 'The “Great Awokening” of Scholarship May Be Ending'

Oppenheimer: "the only way to detect [error] is to be free to inquire"

“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” 

~ J. Robert Oppenheimer, from his article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1951 [hat tip 'Not a Lot of People Know That']

"Wokesters' loyalties are clearly not with the working poor."

"[Wokesters'] loyalties ... are clearly not with the working poor.... [T]his anti-enlightenment movement, popular chiefly among rich whites [is] a movement closer to the far-Right in its dismissal of universalism, militant identitarianism, and fervent support of censorship...
    "[The Woke write] newspaper columns celebrating price-hikes for inner-city car parks, without even a nod as to how crushing they would be for working parents, many of whom are forced to duck out of employment to manage their children at school’s end....
    "[The Woke enjoy] a good chuckle with fellow bourgeois commentator (of which we have no shortage) Moana Maniapoto about the plight of poor white men, oblivious to the deeply conservative subtext of ‘white privilege’ (another gift bestowed upon us by the woke). According to this charmer of a doctrine, if you are white and poor there really is no excuse, because you’re white, and so shouldn’t expect sympathy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps and just stop being bloody poor and unhappy, will you?! Like so many wokisms, this is reheated conservativism.
    "Their open contempt for the poor is crystal in the central drive of this political project: to concentrate cultural, and all other power within their [professional-managerial] class.... [I]t’s well past time that the obnoxious, rich kids currently boring us all to death were told to pipe down, and the working poor were finally given a chance to speak up."

~ Dane Giraud, from his post 'Attacking woke politics is the most Left-wing thing you can do'

"Burning books that we don’t approve of is the only way to stop fascism."

"There has been much handwringing in the press lately over the progressive rewriting of Roald Dahl’s books, as though this were a bad thing. If I had my way, every copy of every book by every straight white male would be incinerated. Burning books that we don’t approve of is the only way to stop fascism....
    "[I]nstead of simply tinkering with children’s literature, why not just stop teaching children how to speak in the first place? .... To live in a truly free society, there must be limits on individual forms of verbal expression. So, if we never talk to children, or provide them with books, they will simply grow up without the capacity to express hateful ideas.
    "I can’t believe no one else has thought of this."

~ satirist Titania McGrath, from 'her' post 'Speaking English is Colonial Terrorism'

"If everything is an existential threat and words are violence, real violence can seem more and more to be justified."

 

"The politicisation of science, the honing of the activists tools for cancellation of people they don’t like, and the involvement of government in collusion with big tech and media to control 'disinformation' ... may [well] alienate and attack so many people that their supporters become a minority....
    "It is indeed ironic [however] that those who claim to be squashing existential threats to democracy, have themselves caused a climate of growing acceptance of intimidation and threats, political violence and serious violations of ... law. If everything is an existential threat and words are violence, real violence can seem more and more to be justified."

~ David Young from his post 'How the Disinformation Industrial Complex is destroying trust in science' [hat tip Watts Up With That]

PART 5: Intersectionality, or: 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

 

So if you've been reading this series, you now know what identity politics is, and why we've all been talking about gender and race and .... and .... getting so fucking tired of it all. But if you've been reading, now you know what caused all the nonsense, why it stinks so much, and why it's been causing so much bloody conflict. 

Here's something else about it that stinks. If you've been around academia or company's personally departments, you'll have heard the term "intersectionality." And if you've been listening in to people who want to make victims out of everybody, you'll have heard them shouting about it -- and shouting even louder about how they need to silence those who have so-called 'privilege.' 

So just what the hell is this "intersectional analysis"? And why should you care? Your second-favourite blogger is on the case...

Intersectionality: How some tribes are made more equal than others

"Identity politics amplifies the human proclivity for us-versus-

them thinking. It prepares students for battle, not for learning."

~ Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind

THE "MYSTERIOUS HIDDEN FORCES in society” mentioned in Part 4, those concealed agents of oppression that Marx + Marcuse allegedly uncovered, are what they say justifies the blatant suppression of free speech. To fight against this would-be censorship, you have to know how they generally go about it.

Marcuse’s hidden structure is given legs by the left’s tool of so-called “intersectionality.” In essence, it's an engine to divide and conquer -- to create in innocent folk the omnipresent feeling of victimhood, and in others the disarmingly guilty feeling of unearned privilege. Why would someone do this to others? Simple. Because they want power. If you can talk on behalf of some folk while you help silence others, then political power can be yours, you hope. It might be only a stone's throw away.

In his best-selling book The Coddling of the American Mind, American academic Jonathan Haidt traces the emergence of this influential tool to a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor then at UCLA (and now at Columbia, where she directs the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies). In the essay, she argues that a black woman’s experience in America is more than just the sum of “the black experience” and “the female experience.” There are “layers” of structural oppression, she claims, that this would allegedly gloss over.

Crenshaw’s important insight [explains Haidt] was that you can’t just look at a few big “main effects” of discrimination; you have to look at interactions, or “intersections.” More generally, as explained in a recent book by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge: ‘Intersectionality as an analytic tool examines how power relations are intertwined and mutually constructing. Race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, nation, religion, and age are categories of analysis, terms that reference important social divisions. But they are also categories that gain meaning from power relations of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation.’[1]

These categories can be mapped on a diagram as a series of bipolar dimensions, as one Kathryn Pauly Morgan did in a famous diagram now taught in university classrooms around the western world. Every graduate from the last two decades in most disciplines has had this rammed down their impressionable young throats. The simplified diagram shown below shows only seven axes of victimhood; Morgan herself identifies fourteen!

In an essay describing her approach [says Haidt], Morgan explains that the centre point represents a particular individual living at the “intersection” of many dimensions of power and privilege; the person might be high or low on any of the axes. She defines her terms like this: “Privilege involves the power to dominate in systematic ways …. Oppression involves the lived, systematic experience of being dominated by virtue of one’s position on various particular axes.” Morgan draws on the writings of French philosopher Michel Foucault to argue that each of us occupies a point “on each of these axes (at a minimum) and that this point is simultaneously a locus of our agency, power, disempowerment, oppression, and resistance. The [endpoints] represent maximum privilege or extreme oppression with respect to a particular axis.”[2]

If this looks like a particularly lunatic version of a magazine quiz (“10 Questions to Reveal How You’ve Been Victimised By Reality” or "7 Questions to Expose Your Privilege") or a particularly disrespectful parlour game (just how insulted should, say, a non-white disabled female feel at being told they’re a victim of nature?) then you’d be right.[3] It is precisely what Washington Post journalist Michael Gerson once described as “the soft bigotry of low expectations,”[4] performed as a pseudo-scientific dance.

According to Morgan’s view however, any young, white, attractive, euro, anglophone who is a gentile, heterosexual, able-bodied, rich, credentialed, cis-gendered, fertile male is ipso facto an oppressor to some degree. Whatever they’ve done, or haven’t done themselves. [Shout this loud enough, and Marama Davidson will show up soon enough to applaud.]

Quite how you are responsible for someone else’s alleged infirmity is another matter never fully addressed: what nature has rent asunder in the poor, infertile, disabled, non-white, lesbian, politics will (somehow) be able to make whole again. And note that however much the politicians screw the scrum in favour of these alleged victims, they still remain victims by virtue of their underlying power differential. (So as the Hobson’s Pledge organisation has discovered, whatever happens in law to “redress the power imbalances” to favour minorities, middle-aged straight white males will always remain their oppressors.)

And it matters not at all how tolerant you yourself are; in this world of power-driven adjectives if any one of those privileged adjectives describes you (able-bodied, fertile, swinging a penis) then you are one of the oppressing class and, in the views of Marcuse and his followers and fellow travellers, people like you must be silenced as a matter of social justice. After all, “the end goal of a Marcusean revolution is not equality but a reversal of power.”

Marcuse offered this vision in 1965:

It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don’t have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise [i.e., the allegedly 'privileged'], and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth [i.e., the alleged victims of reality] presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.’[5]

There have been millions willing  and eager to undertake that suppression. Often violently.

NOW REMEMBER, THIS IS what your children are being taught on every campus.

Imagine an entire entering class of college freshmen whose orientation program includes training in the kind of "intersectional thinking" described above, along with training in spotting so-called micro-aggressions, [i..e, what we used to call an unintentional slight, but can now be "weaponised" by the would-be power-luster. More on this here and here.] By the end of their first week on campus, students have learned to score their own and others’ levels of privilege, to identify more distinct identity groups, and to see more differences between people. They have learned to interpret more words and social behaviors as acts of aggression. They have learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent … [and they'll have forgotten what they went to university to learn, and have no time in the curriculum for it anyway.]

This combination of common-enemy identity politics and micro-aggression training [see Chapter 6] creates an environment highly conducive to the development of a “call-out culture,” in which students gain prestige for identifying small offences committed by members of their community, and then publicly “calling out” the offenders. One gets no points, no credit, for speaking privately and gently with an offender—in fact, that could be interpreted as colluding with the enemy.[6]

How will students fare who have been taught this bile? We don’t even need to guess, just observe:

Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Furthermore, there is no escaping the conclusion as to who the evil people are. The main axes of oppression usually point to one intersectional address: straight white males.

You've wondered why the "woke" can so easily label straight white folk as "Nazis"? Here's a clue right here. But even a non-straight can be in danger if they're part of the "power structure":

An illustration of this way of thinking happened at Brown University in November of 2015, when students stormed the president’s office and presented their list of demands to her and the provost (the chief academic officer, generally considered the second-highest post). At one point in the video of the confrontation, the provost, a white man, says, “Can we just have a conversation about—?” but he is interrupted by shouts of “No!” and students’ finger snaps. One protester offers this explanation for cutting him off: “The problem they are having is that heterosexual white males have always dominated the space.” The provost then points out that he himself is gay. The student stutters a bit but continues on, undeterred by the fact that Brown University was led by a woman and a gay man: “Well, homosexual … it doesn’t matter … white males are at the top of the hierarchy.”[7]

OBSERVE AGAIN THAT ALL the qualities chosen by the intersectionalists are, almost each and every one of them, something you have at birth, something about which you can do nothing, something which (in their own eyes) is considered to be a negative. There is not a single quality about which one can do anything, and almost none that have real existential import. In a very real sense, these identitarians are not just in revolt against reality, they are blind to genuine human values.

[T]he tribalists keep proclaiming that morality is an exclusively social phenomenon and that adherence to a tribe—any tribe—is the only way to keep men moral … [Yet their only moral] standard is “We’re good because it’s us.”[8]

For centuries, philosophers have identified morality as a science based on free will -- a field of study based on our ability to make choices, and to judge those choices against a given moral standard. But by this intellectual sleight of hand, your ability to make choices is considered irrelevant to whether your are good or bad. Your birth made you that way -- and the intersectional diagram will show you how.

The intersectionalists have chosen qualities, of course, that you cannot change -- and that, since only the un-privileged few who are victims are able to ever acquire -- are necessarily divisive. But one could just as easily, and with much more coherence, draw up a diagram of life-giving virtues which anyone (even the alleged victims) could choose; actions and behaviour that one could follow as a means to shake off their poor start in life, perhaps, and to pursue real, meaningful life-enhancing values – like those shown in Figure 4 below. But benevolent outcomes like individual growth, prosperity, success and happiness take individual effort, not group whinging – “his own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it”[i] – and would hardly fuel the social unrest Marcuse and his followers are after. Indeed (if you recall) their system is designed to mitigate against these very things!

Happy, successful people don’t follow dictators. Victims do. And it is victims that these power-lusters hope to harvest.

Commenting on this phenomenon at its birth, many years ago, Ayn Rand observed that it marked an important transition in human affairs: the explicit emergence of what she called “the hatred of the good for being the good,” and the arrival on the scene of creatures dedicated only to destruction. She marked the 

virulent cases of hatred, masked as envy, for those who possess personal values or virtues: hatred for a man or woman because he or she is beautiful or intelligent or successful or honest or happy. In these cases, the creature has no desire and makes no effort to improve its appearance, to develop or use its intelligence, to struggle for success, to practice honesty, to be happy (nothing can make it happy). It knows that the disfigurement or mental collapse or the failure or the immorality or the misery of its victim would not endow it with his or her value. It does not desire the value: it desires the value’s destruction. (Emphasis in the original.) [9]

It represents not just a revolt against values, but against reality itself.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity[10] is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be “redistributed,” they seek to deprive men of their consequences—of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues.[11]

NOW, I BET MANY of you on the so-called "right' are reading all this while thinking smugly to yourself things like "those stupid Lefties," and  "at least I'm too smart to have fallen for all that crap." Well, tomorrow I'll explain to you why you're probably very wrong about that.

More on that tomorrow...

CONTINUED IN PART 6: 'The Right Adopts the Left's Love Child'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'
• Part 4: 'Politics + Poly-logic: Marx + Marcuse'

NOTES
[1] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (pp. 67-68). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid (pp. 68-69). 

[3] As Hicks and others have noted, this form of measurement raises suffering and victimhood to a kind of moral high ground. It’s underlying ethic sets others above self, the weak above the strong, and elevates those who suffer most over those who avoid or diminish suffering. Indeed, it sets a group’s victim status as central to social virtue, and sets all rules in relation to their alleged suffering. The connection to so-called hate speech should be obvious. See on this the discussion between Yaron Brook, Onkhar Ghate and Greg Salmieri on Free Speech & Patreon, December 2018, https://www.blogtalkradio.com/yaronbrook/2018/12/23/yaron-brook-onkar-ghate-greg-salmieri-free-speech-patreon

[4] Gerson coined it for a 2002 George W. Bush speech to the NAACP, which concluded “No child in America should be segregated by low expectations, imprisoned by illiteracy, abandoned to frustration and the darkness of self-doubt."

[5] Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind (p. 66). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

[6] Ibid (p. 71).

[7] Ibid  (p. 70)

[8] Ayn Rand, ‘Selfishness Without a Self,’ collected in the book Philosophy: Who Needs it

[9] Ayn Rand, ‘The Age of Envy,’ (1971) collected in the book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1971

[10] The ‘Law of Identity’ to which she refers is Aristotle’s philosophical law, not to be confused with the laws created by identity politics. It can be quickly summarised as: things are what they are.

[11] Ibid.

[i] Ayn Rand, on whose virtue schema this diagram is based, from ‘Galt’s Speech,’ collected in For the New Intellectual

IDENTITY POLITICS (Part 4): Politics & Polylogism, Marx + Marcuse

So now you know what identity politics is, and something about what makes it stink: it stinks, because it says everyone who's born the same, or are grew up the same, thinks the same. So "stay in your lane"!

It suits the group-think merchants to promote this bullshit because (they hope) they can surf to political power on the group conflict it creates.

But how do they get away with it?

TODAY we burrow down into how this idiotic groupthink emerged into political life, and from where. And for that, we have to go all the way to Germany, and a bearded bloke in the British Museum Library, and their excuse for why the proletariat seems so generally happy with the fruits of capitalism, and wholly un-ready to revolt ...

Some Causes: Politics & Polylogism

"To the Frankfurt School, Freud offered a psychology admirably suited

to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism… Thus Marcuse has an

explanation for the new generation of revolutionaries-in-training for

why capitalism … seems to be peaceful, tolerant, and progressive—when,

as every good socialist knows, it cannot really be—and for why the

workers are so disappointingly un-revolutionary. Capitalism does not merely 

oppress the masses existentially, it also represses them psychologically."

~ philosopher Stephen Hicks (Explaining Post-Modernism, pp 162-3)

THE POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES REPRESENTED by encouraging group conflict were grasped early by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979).

Marcuse had a rare heritage. He was a German Marxist from the Frankfurt School, and also a student of Martin Heidegger, who embraced Nazism during the later war. In the rarefied atmosphere of Sixties America, Marcuse's writings on revolt and political power would make him “the father of the New Left.”

From Marx, Marcuse got the rejection of reason as a universal tool.  Like Marx, he promoted instead the notion of poly-logism – of so-called “multiple logics” – the idea that the conditions of one’s birth and upbringing “hard wire” your thinking and your very means of thought. 

You think we're all talking past each other? Of course, say Marcuse and Marx: because what's true in logic for your group is not true for mine.  They do mean this literally:

Marxian polylogism asserts that the logical structure of the mind is different with the members of various social classes. Racial polylogism differs from Marxian polylogism only in so far as it ascribes to each race a peculiar logical structure of mind and maintains that all members of a definite race, no matter what their class affiliation may be, are endowed with this peculiar logical structure. [Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action]

It wasn't born as a "socialist" idea however. It was embraced by both right and left: For the European left at this time, the defining feature was class; for the European right, it was race. For both, the important thing was the collective -- the only difference was how the collective was defined. 

This could seem amusing. For one example, David Ricardo’s 200-year-old Law of Comparative Advantage (which demonstrates the win-win proposition of free trade) was condemned by German Marxists because he was bourgeois, by German racists because he was a Jew – and by German Nationalists because he was English! So that was it: free trade was out, without any need at all to address any of Ricardo’s reasoning. Because by this anti-principle of multiple logics, reason is no longer universal, and each group has its own “logic” – precisely the formula for dissent, disagreement, and disruption that a Marcuse was after.

Marcuse was reinforced in this rejection of reason by Heidegger, who called it that “most stiff-necked adversary of thought" – an obstacle to be discarded. Marcuse was happy to throw it out: bathwater, baby, and all. 

HE THEN SET ABOUT about redressing the problem apparent to every Marxist no matter how blind: that the masses were simply failing to become impoverished under capitalism, and would therefore never rise up in revolt in the manner than Marx had long predicted. 

On this troublesome point, Marcuse found comfort in the ideas of Sigmund Freud. When Freud applied his worrisome psychoanalytics to social philosophy, he found himself arguing that civilisation is “an unstable, surface phenomenon based upon the repression of instinctual energies,” the forces of civilisation having evolved (according to Freud) “by incrementally suppressing instincts and forcing their expression into polite, orderly, and rational forms. Civilisation is thus an artificial construct overlaying a seething mass of irrational energies in the id.”[1]  To Marcuse and, the Frankfurt School, “Freud offered a psychology admirably suited to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism.”[6]

It was not that the masses were not impoverished, argued Marcuse[3], who was blind to folk around him who were enjoying the fruits of rising post-war prosperity. It was simply, he argued, that individuals en masse were themselves blind to the so-called “structural impoverishment”that is allegedly implicit in the capital system,:“increasingly unaware that the apparently comfortable world they live in is a mask for an underlying realm of brutal conflict and competition.”[8] 

You didn't realise all that was seething underneath the surface of your weekly supermarket shop, did you.

Since the proletariat themselves however are blind to this brutal, if implicit, “structural” oppression -- if Joe Sixpack enjoying his relative peace and comfort to much to even see it -- then Mr Sixpack must have his eyes opened! Opened, insisted Marcuse, by overt political action from outside the proletariat. By a “great refusal.” It was the job of the insightful activist, he said, to "lift the veil" from victims’ eyes. Only then would they rise up and overthrow their structural oppressors. 

ALL THIS SOUNDS MAD enough. But first, he had to sell them a new idea of oppression. Instead of being happy in their own rising wealth and prosperity, they had to be taught to be unhappy in the alleged inequality of this blessings across the land -- to be upset that some others were pulling down more -- to be angry that the majority of the wealth, comfort, and power was in the hands of the "oppressors." To be angry about it, and to act.

One of the first "direct actions" Marcuse called for was to silence these alleged “oppressors.” (This was "cancel culture" back in the sixties.) Silencing the alleged oppressors on the grounds of this new view of equality, based upon so-called “power differentials.” Silenced as a matter of "social justice." In his widely influential 1965 essay titled “Repressive Tolerance,”

Marcuse argued that tolerance and free speech confer benefits on society only under special conditions that almost never exist: absolute equality. He believed that when power differentials between groups exist, tolerance only empowers the already powerful and makes it easier for them to dominate institutions like education, the media, and most channels of communication. Indiscriminate tolerance is “repressive,” he argued; it blocks the political agenda and suppresses the voices of the less powerful. If indiscriminate tolerance is unfair, then what is needed is a form of tolerance that discriminates. A truly “liberating tolerance,” claimed Marcuse, is one that favours the weak and restrains the strong. Who are the weak and the strong? For Marcuse, writing in 1965, the weak was the political left and the strong was the political right.[5]

He went on to argue that that the forces of the left must therefore use the arguments of “tolerance” against the powerful forces of intolerance allegedly commanded by the capitalist class. He therefore demanded 

the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought [sic] may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behaviour – thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.[6]

Remember, this is what he called "repressive tolerance."

If we summarise, he is arguing that

“Because Western civilisation is inherently oppressive... speech should be free for those who oppose freedom, capitalism and the foundations of Western society, but not for those who defend them.”[7]

And in case the reader misses it, Marcuse makes the point explicit:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. [8]

This is a message impossible for any reader to miss. And they don’t.

[Remember some years ago for example when Chris Trotter was defending Helen Clark's illegal pledge-card spending as "acceptable corruption"? And then applauding her subsequent Electoral Finance Act “shutting down those with money [as] a necessary restriction on freedom of expression”?[10] That's where this comes from. Observe the widespread justification and even denial of the violence in Albert Park earlier this month? That's where it leads.] 

Following this script, those who dissent from the new orthodoxy are shouted down, denied platforms, forced into sensitivity re-education courses, forbidden from speaking, intimidated, mobbed, and even threatened with violence to get them to shut up. Consider again University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s call to her backers — “Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here!” [9] That was Marcuse’s message in action. So too is the shouting down of "TERFs" and "Nazis" by folk too ignorant to even know what Nazism means.

All is acceptable when it’s your Team’s corruption you're defending.

We see here too, slithering in from stage left, one of the most irrational ideas afloat on this whole sea of abject, anti-rational nonsense: the idea that is called intersectionality. It is this notion – justifying that some groups be made more unequal than others – that powers much of the tribalism shutting down modern debate.

MORE ON THAT TOMORROW.

CONTINUED IN PART 5: Intersectionality, or 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'

NOTES

[1] In his 1930 book Civilisation and Its Discontents
[2] Summaries of Freud and Marcuse are from Stephen Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition), (2013), pg 161-2.
[3] In his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation, making the obvious hat tip to Freud’s tome, and the 1964 best-seller One-Dimensional Man
[4] Ibid, pg. 162-163, summarising the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer
[5] Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind; How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, pg. 65
[6] Herbert Marcuse, ‘Repressive Tolerance,’ 1965
[7] Steve Simpson, ‘At the Heart of the Attacks on Free Speech, (2015), collected in Defending Free Speech, ed. Steve Simpson (2016)
[8] Ibid.
[9] Tom Palmer, ‘The Three Most Pressing Threats To Liberty Today,’ Cato Policy Report, December, 2016
[10] Editorial, NZ Herald, 18 December, 2017, which noted that “during the controversy over this bill. Illiberalism reigned. ‘People shouldn't be able to say that,’ was a common refrain… There was often an implied trade-off: that shutting down those with money was a necessary restriction on freedom of expression. It reeked of political commentator Chris Trotter's disgraceful conclusion a year ago that the unlawful spending on Labour's pledge card had been acceptable corruption.”

"The polarisation of argument, combined with the intellectual arrogance of all those who think they know the truth, bode ill for the future of reasoned discourse"

Freedom of Speech (1943) by Norman Rockwell

"[A]llowing 'offensive' speakers to have their say ... you might learn something from the speaker, or at least be able to sharpen your own arguments ... In the professional world [especially], it won’t be enough to deem ... opponents evil and declare the battle won....
    "[T]here’s really nothing here that you can’t read in the must-read pamphlet 'On Liberty' by John Stuart Mill (it’s free online here, WHICH YOU MUST READ NOW), except it goes doubly for law students, who are constantly, no matter what their job, forced to stand in their opponents’ shoes and think, 'What is the best argument they can throw at me?' If they don’t think that way, they’ll be lousy lawyers.
    "But this goes for everyone else, too. Unfortunately, the polarisation of [argument], combined with the intellectual arrogance of all those who think they know the truth, and thus doesn’t have to listen to anybody’s arguments, bode ill for the future of reasoned discourse."

~ Jerry Coyne, from his post 'Pamela Paul on the Stanford Law School debacle'

"In years to come, there is every reason to believe that historians will look back on this week as one in which the battle lines of the trans rights war were redrawn..."

"There has been a watershed moment in the trans debate, sparked by the landmark decision about female athletes.
    "Sport, so focused on winning and losing, on rules and competition, can bring a reductive clarity to the complexities of life. Perhaps that is why the judgement this week of the World Athletics Council was so momentous. Put simply, council president Sebastian Coe had to choose between [allegedly] conflicting 'rights' and he decided that the right of those born women to compete fairly trumps the desire to be included in elite sport of those who have gone through male puberty but run or jump as women. 'We felt,' he said, 'that having transgender athletes competing at elite level would actually compromise the integrity of female competition.'
    "[S]port, with ... reductive clarity, is not so concerned with sensitivities. It is concerned with the irrefutable reality of the stopwatch and winner’s podium. And they starkly reveal the distortions that testosterone and its consequences for muscle, stature, strength and speed wreak on the track and field....
    "[T]he transgender rights fissure that opened up in sport echoes that in politics and society more widely. There, faced with increasing public concern, other leaders are increasingly being forced to choose as well. Equivocation is no longer enough. It was oddly fitting, for example, that Coe’s decision in athletics came on the very same day that SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon left office – a titanic, once unassailable figure finally, if not exclusively, propelled into the political void by her support for the Gender Recognition Reform Bill.... That decision ... came hard on the heels of the devastating Cass Review which led to the closure of [London's] controversial Tavistock clinic ... [a]nd the decision at the end of last year by [UK] charities regulator to launch a statutory inquiry into Mermaids, the transgender campaign group....
    "[I]n years to come, there is every reason to believe that historians will look back on this week as one in which the battle lines of the trans rights war were redrawn....[or, perhaps, clarified]... [I]t apparently turns out that the view that society cannot be ruled by social media’s cancel culture mob is widely held."

~ Harry de Quetteville, from his op-ed 'The Week the Tide Turned in the Gender War'

Don't feed the grifters

 

In a world in which people make money from "clicks," there will always be grifters who are happy to be live clickbait. 

On Saturday, down in Queen St, we had Profit Brian Tamaki and his mob of followers bravely telling passersby not to allow poofters, paedophiles and "child groomers" to be out in public (by which, I think, they mean transgender folk). But his chief message was: "Click on Me!"

Up the hill in Albert Park, we had a mob full of "tolerance" and "love" summoned by trans activist Shaheed Lal, there to fight Nazis, howl down the main event, and to get people to "Click on Me!"

And the Main Event there at Albert Park -- or at least the woman who had come halfway across the planet to be "The Main Event" -- was a woman who calls herself The Posie Parker (it's a pun, you see), who has made her living in recent years ("Click on Me!" "Click on Me!") by telling people who like to hear it that penises shouldn't be in women's spaces.

Yes, that really is what she came here to say, as she tried to tell Kim Hill last week. (And as you'll hear, she didn't make a very good job if it.) But she didn't get to say it at all, not at least in Albert Park or Wellington, where she was due to say it next, because the mostly peaceful mob summoned by Shaheed Lal (who makes his living, it seems, by advising govt ministers on "rainbow issues" and writing columns about those issues for the Herald) fought off the twenty or so old people who had hobbled there to hear her. Fought them off bravely with their fistfuls of love. (Shaheed's mob had come there to "fight Nazis" they said -- "so ready to fight Nazis"! -- but of jackboots and German helmets there were none. Just a few old folk who never got to hear their speaker.)

"We won!" said the mob, in a self-described "victory for free speech," when The Posie Parker scuttled off with a headful of tomato sauce, heading for the nearest international airport.

But at the same time, The Posie Parker herself was tweeting her supporters, telling them the fight is clearly bigger than they all thought, for which she will need more cash -- and lots of it.

And meanwhile, down in Queen St, Brian Tamaki was sending around the collection plate to pay for his next Harley.

There are grifters everywhere, on every loud and voluble side. Making a living by making themselves live clickbait.

This is all very exciting to the protagonists, I'm sure and to the newscasters who need them, because it fills up their news broadcasts and column inches with colourful but undemanding fare. Because it's issues played out simply for live clickbait. Activism theatre. "Activists" observing an issue out there, and discovering how to make clickbait out of it. 

There's a certain genius to this kind of activism. To make an important stand and to discuss the issues in order to come to a reasonable and rational conclusion about them? No, not at all: in order to attract more followers. And more clicks.

So instead of discussing the issues, on Saturday we saw lots of people shouting and throwing fists, but nobody listening. Lots of heat, but no light. 'Cos mostly what they were all shouting anyway, effectively, was not much more than just: "Click on Me!"

Cancel Culture meets Clickbait Culture. Everyone's a Winner!

These people all need each other. They are part of a mutually reliant ecosystem. Without each of them shouting out their bumpersticker slogans, none of them would be making any kind of living at all. But without any of them, we might be able to have a decent chat about the issues they all say they stand for (or against).

RELATED:

Bryce Edwards: The Ugly stoking of a culture war in election year
Saturday’s clash of cultures is a sign of where politics is heading in New Zealand – towards a fully-fledged culture war. This is something normally more associated with American politics – but also increasingly in places like the UK.
    There was an element of pantomime on both sides over the last week. Posie Parker thrives on controversy. She might be complaining now about her treatment in New Zealand, but by holding her rally in a public place like Albert Park she was provoking opposition and stoking tensions, hoping to become something of a martyr.
    She won. She made global news, fuelling publicity in the UK and US markets where she carries out her main fundraising....
    Likewise, those opposing Parker were rather opportunistic in arguing that she is a fascist and that her beliefs were such a danger to the public that she had to be banned from the country.
    They must have known they were giving the previously-unknown visitor huge amounts of free publicity and therefore helping get her views out to a wider audience. As broadcaster Heather du Plessis-Allan argued yesterday, “Parker’s opponents made sure that she was in the news most of the week”, and “They helped her spread her message. They played right into her hands.”
    The Greens represent one side of the polarised divide. MP Golriz Ghahraman tweeted on her way to the rally: “So ready to fight Nazis”. Co-leader and Government Minister Marama Davidson put out a video to say that she was “so proud” of the protesters. And obviously wearing her hat of Minister for Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence she used the event to declare that only “white cis men” commit violence. Such messages will go down very well amongst the party’s support base, which is increasingly sensitive to the need to make progress on gender issues. [>>READ MORE]

 

"Modern Readers" + Old Books

"Here's an idea: instead of making sure old books are 'suitable for modern readers,' how about making sure modern readers are suitable for old books."

~ David Burge, aka @Iowahawk, tweeting on the Roald Dahl bowdlerisation

Advice

"The next time you see someone enjoying something that isn't hurting anyone, that's not your cup of tea, instead of saying something negative, train yourself to think to yourself, 'I'm glad they are happy' and carry on with your life."

          ~ Mark MacKillop [hat tip Duncan B., Alex + TinyBuddha]

" One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy...."

"One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy. In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College:

Supported comfortably, Newton was free to devote himself wholly to whatever he chose. To remain on, he had only to avoid the three unforgivable sins: crime, heresy, and marriage.

    "The first time I read that, in the 1990s, it sounded amusingly mediaeval. How strange, to have to avoid committing heresy. But when I reread it 20 years later it sounded like a description of contemporary employment....   
    "Why has this antiquated-sounding religious concept come back in a secular form? And why now?
    "You need two ingredients for a wave of intolerance: intolerant people, and an ideology to guide them. The intolerant people are always there. They exist in every sufficiently large society.... To unite [them], an ideology must have many of the features of a religion. In particular it must have strict and arbitrary rules that adherents can demonstrate their purity by obeying, and its adherents must believe that anyone who obeys these rules is ipso facto morally superior to anyone who doesn't....
    "How do you disable the concept of heresy? Since the Enlightenment, western societies have discovered many techniques for doing that, but there are surely more to be discovered.
    "Overall I'm optimistic...."
            ~ Paul Graham, from his article 'Heresy' [hat tip Duncan B.]

"Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity."

"People hope that if they scream loudly enough about 'values,' then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming? [...]
    "Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity."

~ Marshall McLuhan, from his 'Hot and Cool Interview' [hat tip Memes, Dreams and Reflections]

"The Great Awokening has not crowded out Millennial Socialism. It has absorbed it...."

"It is a commonly-held view that ‘socialism vs capitalism’ was yesteryear’s divide, while ‘woke vs unwoke’ is where the action is now: pronouns are the new tax rates, and cancellation is the new nationalisation.
    "The problem with this argument is that it is only true on one side of that divide, namely, the ‘un-woke’ or ‘anti-woke’ side. The opponents of Wokeness do indeed tend to get far more animated about the latest Culture War shenanigans than by the latest economic policy announcements. They also find it easy to form loose coalitions over a shared cultural outlook with people with whom they disagree on economic issues. (For example, a left-wing critic of Cancel Culture can easily get a piece published in a [so-called] centre-right publication.)
    "But it would be a huge mistake to assume that something similar must be true on the other side of that divide, i.e. that on the progressive Left, woke identity politics has somehow crowded out socialist economics. Quite the opposite is true. It is hard to think of a prominent woke culture warrior who is not also a committed anti-capitalist.
    "The Great Awokening has not crowded out Millennial Socialism. It has absorbed it.... Thus, the Culture War is by no means ‘beyond economics’. Instead, economics has become a major front in the Culture War."

~ Kristian Niemietz, from his op-ed 'For the Woke warriors, culture and economics are two sides of the same coin – just ask Mollie-Mae'

[Hat tip Samizdata]

"Political correctness has become quite literally, bad religion run amuck. Cancel culture’s refusal to engage with uncomfortable ideas has an asphyxiating effect on the creative soul of a society." #QotD

Nick Cave, pic from The Grauniad 

"Cancel culture’s refusal to engage with uncomfortable ideas has an asphyxiating effect on the creative soul of a society [It has become quite literally, bad religion run amuck]... 

    "Creativity is an act of love that can knock up against our most foundational beliefs, and in doing so brings forth fresh ways of seeing the world. This is both the function and glory of art and ideas. A force that finds its meaning in the cancellation of these difficult ideas hampers the creative spirit of a society and strikes at the complex and diverse nature of its culture."

~ Nick Cave on today's 'Cancel Culture,' from his post answering the questions 'What is Mercy For You?/ What Do You Think of Cancel Culture?'

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